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Obama Administration Explored Ways To Bypass Smartphone Encryption
An anonymous reader writes: According to a story at The Washington Post, an Obama Administration working group considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow the government to break encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals. The group concluded that the solutions were "technically feasible," but they group feared blowback. "Any proposed solution almost certainly would quickly become a focal point for attacks. Rather than sparking more discussion, government-proposed technical approaches would almost certainly be perceived as proposals to introduce 'backdoors' or vulnerabilities in technology products and services and increase tensions rather [than] build cooperation," said the unclassified memo. You can read the draft paper on technical options here.
The paper covers this with a caveat that most encryption software is open source, freely available and has no central authority that can be compelled. The result of this is that even is some key recovery system is mandated users could simply encrypt their own data underneath the compromised encryption and render the device inaccessible and defeat the entire purpose of the law and international accords.
This caveat is actually on the first page of the document as a "technological limitation".